You may not have noticed this Supreme Court ruling yesterday. In it, the court ruled 5–3 (since the case was heard before Amy Coney Barrett joined) against a man named Clemente Pereida, who had hoped to be able to remain in the U.S. Instead, the ruling means he is ineligible, even though "he appealed to the attorney general to cancel his deportation because of the impact it would have on his son, a U.S. citizen, and the rest of his family."
Pereida, you see, was fined $100 in Nebraska 10 years ago under that state's law because he used a false Social Security number to work. He used that number to pay money into an account that he will get no benefit from. It was not theft, or anything violent. Legally, his crime is called "attempted criminal impersonation," but we all know what it is — it's trying to hold a job when you don't have the right papers, and as I said, the fine was $100, which tells you how seriously it's taken because big corporations (and farmers, and roofing companies) want to have low-wage workers to do their dirty, dangerous work.
But the five "conservatives" on the court ruled that Pereida's 10-year-old offense constituted what's known as "moral turpitude" and therefore made him "ineligible when he appealed to the attorney general to cancel his deportation because of the impact it would have on his son, a U.S. citizen, and the rest of his family." Furthermore, the justices ruled that it was on him instead of the government to show that it wasn't moral turpitude, as if that wasn't obvious on the face of things in his case.
Turpitude is defined as depravity, baseness, vileness, and shameful wickedness.
I can think of a lot of people who fall under the definition of moral turpitude (Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, Bernie Madoff, among others) but a person who enters the country without documentation, supports his family by working for 25 years, and pays into the system without hope of getting anything back from it is not one of them.
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